History of the Motherboard
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
1,298 words · ~6 min read
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just adding a CPU a stick of RAM a storage device and a power supply to a
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mini ITX motherboard will give you a small and fully functional computer in a
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matter of minutes and this is possible because of how many different functions
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the average motherboard combines into one little slab of like fiberglass metal
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and silicon but it wasn't always like this in fact early electronics didn't
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have anything resembling the lovely green boards with black integrated
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circuits that were used to today instead it was common to see individual full
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sized wires linking every capacitor resistor and other component necessary
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to make up a full computer system unsurprisingly this approach took up
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tons of space added a bunch of weight and was relatively fragile meaning that
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the printed circuit board took off in popularity pretty quickly starting in
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the 1950s it should be noted however that these early PCBs were still a far
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cry from the RGB motherboard that you might have sitting in your computer
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right now while back then a simple device like a radio might have gotten
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away with using just one PCB full-fledged computers needed many
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circuit boards to handle different functions connected by a backplane that
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you might consider to be a forerunner of the modern motherboard unlike true
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motherboards though these back planes tended to be dumb connections with no
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actual logic that consisted of little more than a bunch of slots lined up in a
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row so that other expansion cards could be plugged in for example the Altair
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8800 used one slot to insert a processor
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another for memory and so on it wasn't
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until 1981 that we got a big upgrade the
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planar board in the original IBM PC featured an Intel 8088 CPU built in
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memory and actual external IO so it was
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far more than just a glorified bundle of
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wire like smooshed together all you
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could connect directly to it was a keyboard and a cassette drive but it
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also included a handful of expansion slots that didn't look too different
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from what we're used to today and those slots were important because
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motherboards were still so simple that they didn't have features that we
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consider basic now like drive headers
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for example so if you wanted to load up your copy of flight simulator 1.0 you
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would need a standalone disk interface card and we didn't see modern memory
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modules that fit into RAM slots until the mid-1980s either by the late 80s
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though engineers had fully embraced the goal of integrating more and more
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functions onto the motherboard and so little ICS called super i/o chips were
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becoming more common these functioned like rudimentary versions of a modern
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chipset they provided drive controllers ports for printers mice keyboards and
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other devices and the systems BIOS now
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that all doesn't sound like a huge deal today but super i/o chips took up less
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space and they were much more cost effective than expansion cards setting
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the stage for full-featured modern motherboards around the same time in
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1987 specifically we've got the first ever integrated VGA graphics chips when
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IBM released model 50 of their almost
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famous personal system - unlike modern
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integrated GPUs though this was a chip that was affixed to the motherboard
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instead of being built into the CPU itself a paradigm that we saw again
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starting in the mid-1990s as 3d GPUs
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like the s3 trio and the ati rage series
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appeared on motherboards obviating the need for a separate card for basic use
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though GPUs that were soldered onto motherboards began to disappear in favor
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of ones built into CPUs by the mid 2010
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speaking of CPUs let's jump back again to 1989 when the first CPU socket with a
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vaguely modern look socket 1 appeared alongside Intel's wildly popular 486
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processor while earlier designs involved soldering
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the CPU directly to the board or significant force on the part of the
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user to insert or remove them socket one
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had a simple mechanism based around a pin grid array very similar to modern
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AMD sockets though with a mere 169 pins
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but it wasn't just CPU sockets that were getting a facelift expansion slots were
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also changing at that time and it was about time as the ancient is a standard
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had been used since the days of the original IBM PC in 1994 PCI started
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becoming popular in consumer pcs followed by the short-lived AGP for
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graphics cards in 1997 and PCI Express
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which is still with us today in 2004 but
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what about onboard networking in audio well in the mid 1980s there were a
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number of proprietary networking protocols but since the now-familiar
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Ethernet was a relatively simple standard with easy physical construction
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it became the go-to for networking in
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the late 80s and again its simplicity meant that it quickly spread to PC
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motherboards in the early 1990s and although sound cards also started
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appearing on the market in the late 80s and early 90s and we had little internal
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speakers that could emit beeps and bleeps for a while we didn't see true
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fully functional onboard digital sound hit the mainstream until 1999 when Intel
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included the AC 97 standard in its 810
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chipset which incidentally was also the first Intel chipset to include
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integrated graphics meaning it was no longer necessary to have a separate chip
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for video processing be it on the motherboard or on an adapter card so now
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that all of these innovations had a clear home on the PC motherboard the
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stage was set for refinements made possible by decreasing costs and the
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continued miniaturization of components not to mention an increase in processing
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capacity to handle lots of different features meaning that these days even
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small form-factor motherboards feature RGB headers premium power delivery and
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Wi-Fi and of course by lear the 2010
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manufacturers also realized that all those bells and whistles are meaningless
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